Cromemco (Mountain View, Calif.)

Cromemco got its name from Crothers Memorial Hall at Stanford University, where Roger Melen and Harry Garland founded the company as students. The company still exists in Europe selling massively parallel and multiprocessor systems.

The Z-1 was the first system that Cromemco produced, and it used an IMSAI I-8080 chassis to house the Z-1 CPU and other Cromemco boards.

The Z-2 series was the first commercial microcomputer that the U.S. Navy allowed for use aboard ship as is. The system was overbuilt with an industrial-strength 30-watt power supply and a heavy card cage. Early units had no bays in the front panel for mounting storage devices. Cromemco sold the Z-2 for dedicated computing tasks, which is why its front panel has no switches or keys. Users could let the Z-2 run its tasks without fear of someone interfering with its operation. In late 1977, Cromemco introduced the Z-2D, which had an RS-232C interface and could accommodate up to four internal 5.25-inch floppy drives.

Cromemco used custom LSI gate arrays to reduce the overall chip count for the C-10 SP to 45. Without this technology, the count would have been 105. The company might have been the first to use this technology for a personal computer. The main system is built into the monitor, which sold alone as the C-10 model.

The CS1 became a dual-processor system with the addition of the 68000 CPU capable of running both CP/M and CROMIX. CROMIX is multiuser operating system and a variant of Unix that is capable of running CP/M software. The company shipped 1,000 68000-based systems a month in late 1982. Cromemco also offered a System Two (CS2) series that was configured similarly to the CS1, but designed for industrial applications.